So, Saigon life rolls on, my Vietnamese lessons are in full flow – I should be fairly fluent by 2025! 18 English teachers in a class, our teacher is one of our school’s Vietnamese teaching assistants. The other ‘students’ in the class are good craic and we're helping each other as best we can. I find mimicking is the best way to go, as well as making crude comparisons to concepts and noises from English - makes it all the more memorable.
Now then, the minefield that is learning a tonal language; I grasped the concept easily enough and during my mandarin lessons could both hear and produce the four tones used in mandarin. Here there are six. To make matters worse, all words are mono-syllabic and addressing native speakers who have little experience of the troubles facing second language learners can lead to only one thing – frustration on both parts.
It is near impossible to even attempt to pronounce a Vietnamese name without hearing it a minimum of 3 times. As such, I’ve given the students in three out of my five classes English names. I felt it unfair and potentially confusing to ask my younger students to remember English names, so I write their names phonetically on the registers and as such have things like ‘my’, ‘fat’, ‘he’, ‘nee – as in oniony’ printed in black and white for all to see. I often think if I sneezed or coughed in class a child would answer to it.
Similarly, this applies with adults. Myself and the motley crew of fellow professional gypsies known as my colleagues have taken to christening people depending upon their profession. Hence forth we have noodle man, massage man, wonton woman, smoothie man, book lady, cake man and squid man (we all agreed cephalopod bloke was a little too challenging to pronounce after a few rums!). I concede, this is not ideal (nor particularly imaginative on our collective linguistic parts), but it is necessary to ‘save face’. Six tones can likely lead to total confusion and the risk of causing great offence if pronounced slightly incorrectly. Therefore, in a bid to avoid scenes of addressing someone’s mother as a horse (or God forbid worse) I’ll stick with the formula: profession + gender.
So, new experiences recently include eating jellyfish and goat - I can recommend both. I've also mastered the art of riding side-saddle on a xe-om: it's a difficult thing to do in dense traffic whilst wearing a mini skirt and trying not to get burnt legs from the exhausts of neighbouring bikes. I've been volunteering at the Blind Shelter, taking the guys and girls swimming at a local pool with some of the other teachers.
I read an interesting article the other week about the women of Saigon who don polyester matching twin sets - top and trousers sets resembling sweaty pyjamas - I could have a rant about that, but let's not go there. If any of you ladies do want some garish poly mix fabric though I'm sure I can pick out a little number and have it sent home for those warm summer nights! Vietnamese fancy dress in Liverpool girls? - Consider it!
A xx
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